[HN Gopher] Slow software for a burning world
___________________________________________________________________
Slow software for a burning world
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 147 points
Date : 2025-05-10 06:38 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bonfirenetworks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (bonfirenetworks.org)
| Xiol32 wrote:
| I see we still haven't learned to put a summary of what your
| product is/does near the start of any big announcement.
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| Appears to be a fediverse social network like Mastodon, there's
| a demo on their homepage: https://bonfirenetworks.org/
| aloisdg wrote:
| but what kind? Microblogging, macroblogging, link
| aggregation, forum, imageboard etc.
| chobeat wrote:
| there are plugins for all of this stuff and more: there are
| kanban boards, stuff for openscience (I think peer-review
| and the likes), some collaboration features etc etc
| chrz wrote:
| Yes lost me reading after few minutes because I still didn't
| know what I was reading about
| Applejinx wrote:
| They kind of have, because their product is not a thing, but a
| social environment.
|
| I like people like this and admire their purpose, but they
| often don't make anything but manifestos. I make stuff, and I'm
| friends with other people who are sympathetic with this sort of
| thing and also make stuff.
|
| Periodically we all make stuff and give it out to people, which
| in its own way helps cool the burning world, I guess. And folks
| like this make another manifesto when the previous ones didn't
| get people like me and my friends to lay down our tools and go
| to work for them.
|
| It's a challenge, sort of. By which I mean: if the job is to
| get lots of things made, not so much. But if the job is to
| think this stuff out, well they're doing more of that than I
| am. I don't get a lot of help, or seek it: I'm focussed on what
| is waiting to be done within my jurisdiction. That's a limiting
| factor, but it serves my purposes :)
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Refreshing reading. I hope we soon move to an era where this kind
| of initiative is the starting point. (In opposition to the make
| quick money model)
| RetroTechie wrote:
| P2P everything, then.
|
| To scale up to a billion+ users of [whatever], it's easier if
| every user controls their own data (and some of 'nearby' users)
| on their own devices. Logically you'd need P2P between those
| billion+ users to make that network as a whole work.
|
| BUT: figuring out how to do that well, is hard. Doing that in
| centralized manner (centralized database, users are clients
| only, etc) is easier. And gives maximum control to whoever
| starts it.
|
| Of course scaling _that_ means big hosting / bandwidth costs,
| to recoup (and profit!), enter advertising & all the bad
| incentives that come with it.
|
| Like you, I hope the ad-supported everything crap is just a
| transitional stage, and by-the-people, for-the-people becomes
| the norm.
|
| But P2P services done well is _hard_. The struggles of crypto
| coins, (truly) decentralized file sharing, and would-be FB
| competitors are just a few examples.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| Yes i have also been thinking about this lately. P2P , you
| jst send your social updates to a couple of hundred friend
| and family. If you are one of those <<influencers>> then is
| expensive :D
| snickerer wrote:
| I did not understand what this is about from the article. It is
| social and wants to empower people, but how?
|
| From reading the 'about' page I understood that this is a new
| social media platform in the Fediverse.
|
| Now there is obviously one question: why should I participate in
| this and not in the existing projects like Mastodon? Why did you
| split up?
|
| I suggest the Bonfire people should put the answer to that
| question on the top of the 'about' page.
| chobeat wrote:
| Why not participating in Mastodon? Because nobody really wanted
| a Twitter clone and the project is losing its momentum. Lemmy
| is 1000x better even if the total amount of users is less in
| absolute numbers.
|
| Why using Bonfire? The first thing that comes up to me from the
| website is that this model of community-focused development
| seems more resilient to the wave of AI slop. A small Mastodon
| instance with 30-40 active people and limited federation would
| be useless. A Bonfire instance with the same people where you
| can work on community projects or scientific projects, sounds a
| lot more viable while keeping the shields up against the slop.
| ikt wrote:
| > Lemmy is 1000x better even if the total amount of users is
| less in absolute numbers
|
| This is so true, I've had to put a timer on how much I can
| use it as I'm addicted like the old school reddit days
|
| I think all it'll take is reddit messing up and lemmy.world
| might be the new front page of the internet
| Eavolution wrote:
| Reddit really messed up a couple of years ago with the
| killing off of 3rd party apps and u/spez generally being
| entirely out of touch, that made such an impact that to
| this day whenever I find a reddit thread on something I
| usually see a comment along the lines of "contents deleted
| in protest".
|
| That permanently lost me from reddit, I tried kbin.social
| for as long as it was up and I really liked using it. I
| never really got on with lemmy for some reason. The outcome
| ended up being me just not using reddit like things, and I
| really don't miss it that much.
| immibis wrote:
| There isn't really a Fediverse. There's Mastodon, Mastodon-
| compatible software, Lemmy, and Lemmy-compatible software -
| often colloquially referred to as the Fediverse. And then,
| there's everything else, including federated technologies which
| aren't one of the above, such as the web, email, and RSS.
|
| If Bonfire isn't compatible with Mastodon or Lemmy it doesn't
| fit into the former category.
|
| (Anyone who's tried to implement ActivityPub knows it's a lie.
| You implement Mastodon Protocol or Lemmy Protocol. If you
| follow ActivityPub you'll be alone on your own new protocol)
| troupo wrote:
| > Profit over people: at what cost?
|
| Profit hasn't been the goal of Silicon Valley for a very long
| time. Revenue and growth have been the goals, and chasing those
| two has been much more damaging than chasing profits.
| frotaur wrote:
| Aren't they chasing those to ultimately generate profits?
| troupo wrote:
| Not in the past 10 years or so, no.
|
| To the point that Uber said they may never generate profit
| _in their IPO filing_
| GenshoTikamura wrote:
| They may never, but the competitors they killed with being
| VC funded, will never
| troupo wrote:
| Oh, that's a brilliant description
| quesera wrote:
| > _in their IPO filing_
|
| That's meaningless -- just legal boilerplate.
|
| No one wants to be sued for their dog & pony show sales
| pitch, so they _always_ hedge by including explicit doom &
| gloom scenarios in the legal paperwork.
|
| Similar hedges are present in annual reports for corps of
| all sizes.
| troupo wrote:
| > That's meaningless -- just legal boilerplate.
|
| However legal or meaningless, it's their official stated
| position. And they did lose close to 20 billion in total
| before turning a meagre profit.
|
| > so they always hedge by including explicit doom & gloom
| scenarios in the legal paperwork.
|
| Ah yes, "we may never turn a profit that's why we are a
| sustainable long-term serious company and you should
| definitely buy our stock" is a thing that every company
| writes in their legal boilerplate.
|
| > Similar hedges are present in annual reports for corps
| of all sizes.
|
| Uber's annual reports were "we lost a billion dollars
| this year, like every other year before that for 15
| years, but look at our growth go brrr"
|
| Same for most of other HN darlings.
| quesera wrote:
| Yes, that's _absolutely_ what they write. They will
| _always_ be explicit that they could be wrong in
| disastrous ways and they are not misleading you into
| thinking otherwise.
|
| Every public corp's "official stated position" on future
| profitability is, from a legal perspective, the same:
|
| No promises. We might fail because of _(long list of
| endogenous and exogenous reasons)_. Past performance is
| no guarantee of future results. We see headwinds here,
| here, and here. There are headwinds that we cannot see.
| We can 't predict the future. Some hostile actor in some
| country, foreign or domestic, might screw us all by
| legal, political, or military means. Also, natural
| disasters, pandemics, asteroids, and trends. Don't sue
| us.
| troupo wrote:
| There's a difference between "we have never been
| profitable and don't expect to be" and, say, Google's "we
| became profitable, and though there are factors that can
| negatively affect our profitability, here's a path we
| believe is most profitable".
|
| In modern business profitability _never_ enters the
| equation.
| quesera wrote:
| But my point is that _one_ of those statements will exist
| in every filing. If the corp has never been profitable,
| the first. Otherwise, the second.
|
| They mean absolutely nothing about what management
| expects for the future of the company. They are just
| legal boilerplate that is always included.
| immibis wrote:
| How can they take whatever ridiculous percentage of every
| ride and still not make a profit ...?
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Power and dominion, if that hasn't become obvious yet.
| dgb23 wrote:
| When I'm losing I always say "I play the long game".
| xucian wrote:
| there is a fine balance between new features and performance
| (e.g. android/ios apis, .net apis in unity game engine etc.)
|
| but I think there's a consensus around certain software not
| keeping its responsiveness acceleration on par with hardware
| capability acceleration, some of it driven by ideas like
| "everyone phone now has 8gb of ram, c'mon", but most of it by
| profit incentives on the other side, e.g. cloud providers.
|
| I was really happy to discover proxmox (my micro-homelab is a
| dell mini pc, a mid-range asus gaming router, a 2-slot synology
| nas, and it's rocking)
|
| then, hetzner (for workloads that cannot be hosted on my
| homelab), they have an outstanding performance for 3-5$ monthly.
| before that I used aws lightsail, digital ocean droplets, and
| before that I used google cloud. I basically started with the
| worst and ended up with the best, I'm quite sad about that as
| I've wasted so many hours learning the stupid GCP ui, which was
| buggy and convoluted af. basically I went on one of the worst
| paths in terms of devops/sysadmin leverage, wasting time on semi-
| non-transferrable skills. this was not my main job, though, it
| was mostly hobby projects but still
| xprn wrote:
| In my opinion, it's good to make these mistakes earlier rather
| than later on. You got the scars early enough to think there
| must be a better way, as opposed to starting with the "old
| school way" and then thinking that AWS/GCP would make it
| easier.
| xucian wrote:
| hm, I think I would've never gone with a cloud provider if I
| knew about these low-barrier self-hosting solutions.
|
| it definitely helps to have scars, though. just pray
| something/someone takes you out of the pain soon enough (it
| took me ~4y to finally realize there has to be a better way
| at least for small/medium projects)
| rapnie wrote:
| I fail to see how your comment relates to the article or the
| Bonfire project. But maybe the general approach triggered you
| to post this. I am curious. Would you enlighten me?
| danpalmer wrote:
| I cannot figure out what Bonfire _is_.
|
| - The homepage has a bunch of "Bonfire is...", but they don't
| tell me much about how Bonfire achieves any of those goals like
| to be a "commons".
|
| - There's a codebase and documentation, but it comes in _six
| different "flavours"_, although I can only really differentiate
| between two.
|
| - Most of the FAQs just say "wip".
|
| - It proudly states that there are no ads, no tracking, etc, but
| doesn't tell me what there are no ads on, or what isn't tracking
| me.
|
| - It proudly states that it's federated, but as far as what it
| federates _with_ , that's "wip".
|
| I'm all for more federation, more data control, and experiments
| in social networking, but I'm a technical user and I have no idea
| what this is or does. It feels like in service of wanting to be
| as abstract and flexible, it maybe just doesn't solve any actual
| concrete problems.
|
| If it's a toolkit with which to build social networks, that's
| great, but much of the documentation suggests that it's also a
| network itself, suggesting perhaps limited use as a toolkit. If
| it supports ActivityPub or AtProto, it really needs to come out
| and say that up front. "Bonfire is a framework for building
| custom AtProto based social networking applications" would be a
| great summary, or "Bonfire is a Mastodon alternative exploring
| the frontier of ActivityPub federated applications" would be
| great too.
| antfarm wrote:
| "Bonfire is an open-source framework for building federated
| digital spaces where people can gather, interact, and form
| communities online."
|
| https://docs.bonfirenetworks.org/readme.html
|
| Further down the page it says it is built in Elixir with
| Phoenix/LiveView and PostgreSQL.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| A new federated protocol? or does this provide a different
| front end to an existing Federated system?
| chobeat wrote:
| it's a set of plugins built on top of ActivityPub. It's
| like an intermediate layer.
| dejj wrote:
| Reminds me of Urbit. Maybe a HURD server, too.
| mikae1 wrote:
| _> a federated social networking toolkit to customise and
| host your own online space and control your experience at the
| most granular level._
|
| Bonfire social is built on it. https://bonfire.cafe is a
| Bonfire social instance. Looks very Mastodon. Here are some
| other apps built on Bonfire:
| https://bonfirenetworks.org/apps/
| ricardobeat wrote:
| What is "it" though? It's hard to figure out from any of
| the About page, Design, or the README [1, 2, 3].
|
| Only when getting to the Architecture [4] section much
| later in the docs, it starts mentioning ActivityPub, but
| still no useful description of the project - "an unusual
| piece of software" is the only provided bit. Is it a
| framework, a new protocol, a network? Looks like the former
| - an application to write ActivityPub based software, but
| I'm only 50% sure.
|
| [1] https://bonfirenetworks.org/about/
|
| [2] https://bonfirenetworks.org/design/
|
| [3] https://docs.bonfirenetworks.org/readme.html
|
| [4] https://docs.bonfirenetworks.org/architecture.html
| squigz wrote:
| Why are you so unsure about this - it explicitly says
| it's a framework?
| GenshoTikamura wrote:
| >This post was written by the Bonfire maintainers' circle and
| shaped by feedback from the advisory circle.
|
| It is something about community, the sense of belonging,
| glorified bureaucracy, being slow, and good writing. A Kinfolk
| of software.
|
| Relevant meme: "I took LSD last night and had this vision of a
| federated social network that will disrupt the world. Will you
| help bring it to fruition? I can't offer any money right now"
| chobeat wrote:
| It should be both: it's a toolkit with a lot of plugins already
| built-in to have some "flavours" out of the box.
|
| I think it's like when they were saying "blockchain is a
| technology and bitcoin it's its first application" kind of
| thing.
| temporallobe wrote:
| Thanks because I was wondering if I just wasn't "in the know".
| They should do a better job at marketing, especially since it's
| relatively unknown.
| itsanaccount wrote:
| docs seem pretty straightforward:
|
| - Ember - social networking toolkit
|
| - Social - fb/activitypub feed like
|
| - Community - fb groups (wonder if they have voting based
| admin)
|
| - Open Science - a peer review app?
|
| - Coordination - ticket/kanban/w/e productivity software
|
| - Cooperation - fb marketplace?
| doug_durham wrote:
| To reiterate what the earlier poster asked "what is it"? Are
| these 6 fully completed, polished, and ready to use
| applications? Are they ideas for applications? Are they PoC?
| itsanaccount wrote:
| Best go ask their community engagement manager and head of
| product. I'm sure they'll guide you along.
| andrew_lettuce wrote:
| We all - including you - know that's not going to happen;
| the onus is not on the customer to do this. Instead this
| project will fade into obscurity when the small group of
| advocates complete great school and get jobs in private
| industry
| chobeat wrote:
| they are modules of the system
| sherburt3 wrote:
| The website reads like zombo.com except its not meant to be a
| joke.
| andrew_lettuce wrote:
| The author was/is so consumed with virtue signaling they spend
| zero effort actually educating. It was a non stop lecture until
| I stopped reading, which is really too bad.
| darkhorse13 wrote:
| Slightly unrelated maybe, but I'm really hoping that the
| https://once.com model would take off. That would be the change I
| would want to see in the software world. It's more simpler to
| understand than governance, public interest, etc. Just pay once
| and own the software. I really don't think software is that deep
| or has many philosophical implications.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| But isn't that out of sync with reality? If I have to maintain
| software and put in more hours but only get paid once, I have
| to grow and grow and grow to keep getting paid. I'm actually
| developing a screen recording app for macos that's gonna be
| paid once, but will only have updates for a year. You can use
| it until apple changes APIs and whatever, but otherwise it
| wouldn't be a sustainable business model for me.
|
| I think before we talk about being only paid once for software
| (which isn't a finished product like a brick anyway) we need to
| figure that out.
| darkhorse13 wrote:
| No I totally hear you, I don't even practice what I preach
| because I have a subscription-based side-project:
| https://forms.md
|
| I guess I would like to see someone make the Once model work
| to great success. I don't know how you would deal with
| updates and stuff, but that's what I meant. One "simple"
| solution is just charging the LTV (or something that's close
| to it) as the one-time price.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| This was solved before subscriptions took over everything by
| having to pay for new major versions. You pay once and have a
| limited duration of updates, after that you stick with the
| current version or pay again for the upgrade.
|
| The benefit of doing it this way was that the user had a
| choice in upgrading which aligned incentives between users
| and developers. The developer had to deliver tangible
| improvements in order to keep payments from existing users
| coming. These days they change the color scheme every six
| months, remove features, change the UI for no dicernable
| reason and label the whole changelog "Various changes and bug
| fixes" when the product is clearly a mature product that
| should be in maintenance mode with no significant changes
| required.
| johnny22 wrote:
| then there's no money for actual maintenance beyond that
| say a year.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Which is fine.
| trinix912 wrote:
| And also drives user-centric innovation. If I buy your
| app and you release a new major version, you have to
| convince me to buy it again. Which means putting in
| features I'd need as a user, not just the ones that look
| good on shareholder meetings.
| nomdep wrote:
| Which is why Once.com only offers free updates for a year
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The "once model" is just classic computing and it is alive and
| well. Most of the highest quality software work on the pay once
| model, and generally it's very affordable.
| soufron wrote:
| I dont get it. Faster software should use less resources. So? Why
| slower software? :D
| seif_madc wrote:
| Software is built by humans, for humans, and we should feel that,
| see that, when we are using it, and even when we are not using
| it, i mean the resposibility developers should take writing those
| lines of code, the moral side of things, the long term
| consequeces of their blind choices, genius evil algorithms, and
| yes developers and not managers or those people at "the top",
| because at the end of the day, the developer is the one giving it
| all to make that peace of software works, i told myself many
| times before that we have laready reached an era where software
| is built by machines for humans, long before A.I and vibe coding
| .
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| This project looks cool but seems to be more interested in their
| governance model/politics than actually building it? Lot's of
| handwavy references to socialist movements but not a lot of
| documentation?
| ebisoka wrote:
| These sites are easy to figure out.
|
| Go to Main Page
|
| Scroll down to go to the "Code of Conduct"
|
| Search on "Reverse"
|
| Read
|
| "Our community prioritises marginalised people's safety over
| privileged people's comfort. Moderators reserve the right not to
| act on complaints regarding:
|
| 'Reverse' -isms, including 'reverse racism,' 'reverse sexism,'
| and 'cisphobia.' or critiques of racist, sexist, cissexist, or
| otherwise oppressive behaviors or assumptions."
|
| Ask yourself if you want to be a part of a community of people
| that condones certain racism and sexism.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Sigh. There is no such thing as reverse-isms.
|
| For example discrimination based on race is racism,
| objectively. Creating a reverse-ism out of that subjectively
| singles out a particular identity to champion. An effective
| code of conduct would not mention such subjectivity in any
| form.
| charlescearl wrote:
| Racists will always find a way to make ending racism
| "illegal" (they write those "laws"). Love how the US Civil
| Rights Acts and various emancipation clauses always contain
| loopholes to re-enslave folk. Like using civil rights law -
| mostly constructed to make life for formerly enslaved
| Africans plausible - now being used to erase, incarcerate,
| unemploy, de-legitimize, kidnap, and perform deportation of
| the same folks it was intended to protect. It was never
| "color blind" because slavery was not "color blind" (the
| terms always re-inscribe the borders of racism and ableism
| don't they?) Never trust colonizer "law" or "logic". Rant
| done.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Reverse isms are just a more specific type of an ism -
| instead of being wielded by a privilege group against the
| historically marginalized, it's the reverse.
|
| I do agree that it's unkind to treat those two isms
| differently, or to condone one while tolerating the other -
| but pretending that there's not such thing as the 'reverse'
| case seems silly, when it's so easy to define and easy to
| IRL.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Yeah, I understand the intent, but it's still a bullshit
| play for identity politics. I so completely hate identity
| politics. Objectively speaking, the reverse of racism is no
| racism.
| chobeat wrote:
| bro, you posted cringe. This stuff was already edgy non-sense
| in 2016.
| ebisoka wrote:
| This is not my cringe, I'm just reposting the garbage from
| the Bonfire/op COC
| aloisdg wrote:
| What a long way to say that you don't understand Karl Popper
| fosterbuster wrote:
| What should I understand about Karl Popper?
| rhet0rica wrote:
| Popper coined the "paradox of tolerance"--that, in order to
| remain tolerant, a society cannot tolerate everything; in
| particular, it cannot show tolerance toward those who are
| intolerant, as their normalization inevitably leads to the
| demise of toleration in the public sphere.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
|
| We _all_ have to be prepared to bite our tongues in order
| to make the world worth living in, but it has to be a
| negative feedback system--those who fail to restrain
| themselves must (at some point) be censured for the sake of
| the commons. We can argue all day about how _much_
| grumbling should be permitted before we issue the rebuke,
| but total individual freedom invariably destroys society;
| it 's a tragedy of the commons.
| benrutter wrote:
| Isn't the reference and context backwards here?
|
| As in, the "you should read Popper" comment was in
| response to somebody saying they though opting out of
| moderation/censorship was not good. I think Popper would
| broadly agree with this, and say that moderating out
| racism, transphobia etc is essential for good discourse.
|
| This is all unfounded obviously, since Popper didn't ever
| use or write about social media.
| rhet0rica wrote:
| Ah, an easy misunderstanding to make. The initial comment
| by ebisoka was not, in fact, in praise of moderation. The
| dog-whistle is the word "certain" near the end--
| insinuating that the Bonfire policy is to tolerate
| "racism and sexism" so long as it comes from minorities
| and is directed at the majority, following a quotation
| from the policies about how moderators may elect to
| ignore complaints of discrimination or inflammatory
| remarks when they are directed at majoritarian
| identities.
|
| The CoC provides a justification for this decision--
| which, to elaborate on its rather simple framing, is that
| offensive rhetoric directed at minorities is
| qualitatively different from its inverse because it can
| incite racial violence and control the Overton window.*
| ebisoka doesn't consider this a worthy reason for the
| site's policies to admit to a biased moderation policy,
| but it's a deliberate nuance in the design that isn't
| captured in a simple description of the paradox of
| tolerance. (It's not an _entirely_ problem-free policy,
| but the moderators _aren 't_ being instructed to ignore
| all abuse directed at majoritarians, just to be selective
| in what they tolerate. Antipathy is not quite the same as
| intolerance.)
|
| Note also that ebisoka began the post with "these sites
| are easy to figure out," which suggests there is a
| multiplicity of sites like Bonfire that can be summarized
| (and therefore dismissed) purely on the basis of their
| Codes of Conduct. It's a fishing expedition for instances
| of affirmative action.
|
| ebisoka put a lot of work into ensuring that post would
| slip by the radar for the average reader, but it's
| basically the same pattern of euphemisms that is guiding
| the Right's current crusade against DEI.
|
| * Some strings attached. 1) Not as true in pluralistic
| societies or societies with near-equal splits; mostly a
| problem when the dominant group is vastly larger than the
| others. Hence other commenters remarking that this is a
| West-centric policy. 2) At the extreme end of the
| spectrum are places like South Africa and Zimbabwe, where
| the lingering populations of lower-class white people are
| subject to the double-whammy of lack of representation or
| advocacy in society and government, plus being the
| targets of resentment over colonialism.
| graemep wrote:
| Ironically, its also an attitude that assumes everyone taking
| part is from certain groups. Most importantly, that everyone is
| from the west so racism is predominantly something white people
| do.
|
| Their inclusivity assumes the unchallenged dominance of their
| own culture.
|
| As someone who is not white and not entirely western I find it
| very off putting.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| Here's a salient little exercise for you: if you had to
| "steelman" this position, this prioritising of "marginalised
| peoples safety" and (optional) deprioritising of moderating
| "reverse-isms", how would you do it? Try to make a case for
| this position you take such umbrage with
| concordDance wrote:
| While steelmanning is a great practice, it sometimes feels a
| bit unfair that many positions are not allowed to be
| steelmanned (socially or otherwise).
| hackrmn wrote:
| It caught my attention big time. All up until the point the word
| "caracul" was linked to the Zapatista movement, literally -- as
| in, to the Wikipedia page on Zapatista -- which, in turn says:
|
| > is a far-left political and _militant group_ that controls a
| substantial amount of territory in Chiapas, the southernmost
| state of Mexico.[4][5][6][7]
|
| I don't mean to preach political theory now, but as far as I can
| see we're already collectively pretty divided (divide and conquer
| comes to mind): for a project that seems to preach all manner of
| fairness and correction of a system gone wrong, and is arguably
| moderately anti-capitalist (in the sense of objecting some of the
| status-quo product of Silicon Valley's mode of operation), do we
| really need to be thrown all the way to the other end of the
| left-right scale? Is Bonfire arguing for the analogue of
| "militant revolution" of software?
|
| Imagining the project now, I am envisioning green-clad militants
| writing "fair" software. While not without merit, in my opinion
| the explicit political associations detract from the intrinsic
| value something like Bonfire could have for us, who are indeed
| have never been more firmly under the boot of the commercial IT
| industry than now.
| forinti wrote:
| The way I read these capitalist/anti-capitalist debates is that
| those for capitalism usually have an idealized version of it in
| their heads and those against it have some very specific issue
| in mind.
|
| In Latin America, there are many communities that have suffered
| because of specific capitalist ventures: a banana plantation, a
| copper mine, etc.
|
| You have to acknowledge these things and offer a better version
| of capitalism if you want diminish this divide.
| eadmund wrote:
| Meanwhile, those who are for socialism usually have an
| idealised version of it in their heads and those against it
| have some very specific issue in mind.
|
| People are funny.
| itsanaccount wrote:
| You seem to be recoiling from the idea of average people being
| armed and militant. Like its surprising or outside of normal.
|
| Im going to assume you're a reasonable person and have been
| watching some news. You probably think like I do that its good
| for society to follow some laws and have some checks on
| different groups power.
|
| Hows that working out right now? You know without meaningful
| militancy on one side of the political spectrum.
|
| Its been my experience when people ask for "politics" to be
| taken out of a thing they implicitly ask for the politics of
| the status quo. Which is domination by the commercial software
| industry and anything else the rich own, because they write the
| laws.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Treating the symptoms and not the problem.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Funny how I read the title as "slow software is burning the
| world", as in: slow/unoptimized software wastes energy, a good
| portion of that energy comes from fossil fuels, so it is
| literally burning the world.
|
| But anyways, it looks like some kind of framework for social
| networks that is highly politicized and supposedly puts people at
| the forefront but has no problem using AI slop for its
| illustrations.
| floren wrote:
| My understanding of how ActivityPub software tends to operate
| says that while this may be slow, it probably will burn the
| world a bit more... Just see Ted Unangst's posts about writing
| Honk (and dealing with the behavior of other implementations)
| James_K wrote:
| My question for these projects will always be: what do you offer
| over the Web? I'll grant that most people lack the technical
| know-how to create their own website from scratch, but it's
| perfectly possible to buy your own little plot of internet and
| plug-in to some hosting provider who bundles in a blogging
| package.
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